Essay on The Odyssey And Dante 's Inferno

The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno
The Odyssey is an epic written by Homer. This poem is based on a love story that describes the escapades of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Homer tells of the hardships and struggle Odysseus encountered on his way back home to his family after the war. Homer tells of Odysseus’s expeditions as he was travelling home as a hero after the Trojan War. Odysseus faced many challenges and struggles from battling Poseidon, the creatures in the sea and battling the suitors to reclaim his home. Odysseus had to fight creatures from the underworld and at the same time seek guidance from the divine in order to reach his family. On the other hand, Inferno is a divine comedy written by Dante Alighieri. Dante the protagonist in the story is struggling between good and evil throughout the story. In the end, he is able to pledge an allegiance to God and good after exploring both hell and heaven in his expedition. The travels of Dante and Odysseus were plagued with many trials and ordeals, but they all were able to overcome them. Odysseus was trying to return back home to his wife but after angering the gods, they made his journey difficult. While Dante was searching for his humanity through the circles of hell and he passed through many challenges but he was a le to make the right decision in the end.
Upon reading the Divine Comedy, Inferno by Dante Alighieri and The Odyssey by Homer, one sees clearly that, these two stories are totally different. Odysseus in…

Related Documents

The Odyssey, Dante 's Inferno, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Encomium of Helen all have one major factor in common—the exploration of Helen. As we read and watch different descriptions of Helen through three different epochs we explore the different, yet the same ideas in which Helen is depicted. We read as she is described by the Homeric Greeks, the Medieval Christians, and our contemporary age. It is asked that it is described how the different moods in each epoch result in three different readings of…

by writers with different backgrounds, Odyssey by Homer and Inferno by Dante have used the journey of a hero as a metaphor for their maturation. Odysseus is the hero in Odyssey and where Dante is the hero in Inferno. Odysseus struggles against all likelihoods to get back to his homeland. Dante faces the human struggle between good and evil while he makes his way through the different levels in hell. Maturation often arises from the act of heroism.
The Odyssey begins with Odysseus having recently finished…

ideas and statements.
Later, during the Italian Renaissance, Dante Alighieri wrote his groundbreaking Divine Comedy. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy as a sequence of three separate books, Inferno, Purgatorio, and finally Paradisio. The book easily meets the length criteria with 14,233 lines in total with over 900 pages. The story has a clear progression, from hell to purgatory to heaven, each book further divided with circles in Inferno, terraces in Purgatorio and spheres in Paradiso. The continuity…

or not. In the middle of all of this rigor, the students may actually fall in love with some of the texts. Some of the most favorited texts or important texts are the Odyssey by Homer, Dante’s Inferno by Dante Alighieri, Federigo 's Falcon by Giovanni Boccaccio.
The first of the many favorite texts of semester one is the Odyssey by Homer. This is one of the many favorited texts for several different reasons. To many, this is considered the father of epic poetry. As it is one of the first texts…

The rules of hospitality in Greek life were common because of the Greeks ' belief that the Gods could enter their homes and they must be welcoming. When Nestor asks Telemachus and his party “Or d’ye pleasure take, As pirates walk at sea” (Homer, Odyssey, 3.66-67), he invites them into his home regardless of whether or not they are pirates because of these rules of hospitality. The Greeks viewed piracy as just another way of life with considerable risk at sea. However, Christians, especially early…

to make a decision about my three favorite texts from this semester. For my three favorite texts from first semester, I chose Dante’s, Inferno, Plato’s The Republic, and Homer’s, The Iliad.
One of my three favorite texts from first semester is Dante’s Inferno. “The Divine Comedy is a narrative poem describing Dante 's imaginary journey...To reach his goal, Dante passes through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise”(eNotes.com Editors). One of my favorite lines from the first part of Dante’s, Divine Comedy…

literary works spanning from the 5th Century through the 14th Century. Unlike the consistently changing attitudes, the broad definition of retribution remains constant over the cultural differences and the large amount of time covered.
In Homer’s The Odyssey, justice is based around order and balance in the universe. Retribution is used to enforce this balance and ground Homer’s society by helping characters develop a sense of what is just and unjust. To understand the attitude towards retribution, there…